In this photo taken on Saturday, Jan. 27, 2018 people on a partially submerged dinghy boat ask for help in the Mediterranean Sea. Some 800 migrants and two bodies were recovered in the Central Mediterranean Sea on Saturday, the Italian coast guard said.They were spotted in five boats, including two rubber dinghies, and 83 of them were picked up by the NGO Sos Mediterranee’s ship ‘Aquarius’, that took aboard the two dead women as well. (Laurin Schmid/SOS MEDITERRANEE via AP)

As the economy has improved, popular concern, both here and abroad, has shifted to issues of migration and identity. Just last year, immigration, according to Gallup, was seen as the most important issue by barely 5 percent of the population, while the economy was cited by more than four times as many. But now, immigration and undocumented aliens is now the biggest concern to 15 percent of the population, equal to that of the economy.

You can blame Donald Trump, and his focus on that issue, for some of this. But Trump did not create the long mounting migration pressures — including 200,000 unaccompanied children during President Obama’s last term. Nor is he responsible for growing opposition — almost three-to-one — to mass migration among Europeans.

Unrestricted EU migration helped drive Brexit in the U.K., upended Italian politics and sent many traditionally centrist voters elsewhere flocking to anti-immigrant parties, including some on the extreme, quasi-fascist right. The move towards what the Guardian ominously calls “fortress Europe” could even dethrone the current queen of the EU, the much praised “great humanist,” Angela Merkel.

Very painful math

In many ways, this simply reflects the sad demography of our times. Fertility rates have stagnated in virtually all prosperous countries, with even the once relatively fecund United States suffering record low birthrates. In contrast, population growth in many developing countries has generated a huge surplus of young people; nine out of every ten 10 year olds lives in a developing country. International migration, suggests the World Bank, is at a record high at over 250 million living away from home with the U.S.-Mexico corridor still the largest migration pathway in the world.

The diminishing prospects in once rising countries complicate the picture. A decade ago investment flows buoyed large developing economies like South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, and Mexico, and things were looking up even for their poorer neighbors. Now these countries are increasingly becoming “failed states,” creating the potential for endless, massive and seemingly uncontrollable migration pressure in the future.

This leaves the prosperous democracies of the West a thoroughly distasteful choice. They can seal their borders, as Europe and America are already attempting, leaving millions at risk. Or they can accept an almost limitless mass migration placing both an enormous financial burden and a threat to cultural norms forged over centuries, even millennia.

The identity issue

The migrants have limited choices outside the EU, the U.S., Canada and Australia. The governments of China, Japan and the rest of East Asia — the other focal point for global wealth — are unlikely to absorb these masses, except as temporary laborers. But unlike in Asia, Europe and America also boast strong lobbies that see a moral obligation to take potentially millions, and maybe tens of millions, of people from less affluent states.

Just as Japanese and Chinese do not want to become more Muslim or African in character, many in Europe, and not just reactionary nationalists, have become wary of rapid cultural change. Some of the toughest measures to control immigration today are being implemented in liberal countries like Denmark and Holland, and even increasingly crime-plagued Sweden. Many liberals see predominantly Muslim immigration as a threat to women’s rights, homosexual causes and freedom of thought. Rather than struggle for their own values, Europeans and others in the West, French Islamic studies expert Giles Keppel suggests, feel forced by the EU bureaucracy and dominant media that “they must give up their principles and soul — it’s the politics of fait accompli.”

Fortunately, here in America, we do not worry have to worry about Central Americans undermining Christian traditions. But opposition to border control — including rising progressive calls to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement — still undermines the basic notions of an ordered democracy. Although slightly less than half of Americans back Trump’s Wall, the vast majority, according to one recent Quinnipiac survey, consider illegal immigration a major problem.

Essentially dismissing citizenship and assimilation even as goals, progressives in both Europe and America inadvertently have exacerbated a xenophobic, and potentially destructive, response on the right. In Europe, Angela Merkel’s bonehead open door policy, partly motivated by a legitimate concern about a rapidly aging, shrinking workforce, may lead to shutting down even positive immigration. America too faces a demographic challenge; due to its stagnant birth rate, immigrants accounted for roughly half the growth in the domestic workforce since 2005.

Needed now is that rarest of things: common sense. Plans such as Sen. Bob Goodlatte’s, R-Virginia, proposal to reduce by one fourth legal immigration, not only undermines our basic national ethos, but also our self-interest. America, particularly the often depopulating Trumpian country between the elite coasts, desperately need ambitious, entrepreneurial and often skilled migrants.

The best solution to this conundrum lies neither in the open borders increasingly embraced by progressives or closed ones supported by the nativist right. We need sensibly regulated barriers that allow demographically challenged countries to revitalize themselves without self-destructing or undermining their key institutions. Now all we need are politicians willing to explore this approach.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).